While I was engaged in a very heated radio debate just the other day, my opponent nonchalantly stated, “Cyprus, I could care less about them. They have a population of fewer than one million people and their problem involves fewer than 10 billion euros, so what’s the big deal?” The difficulty of debating a Kool-Aid drinking, emotion-not-facts-spouting-liberal is that it’s much like herding cats. In fact, cats are much easier to contain than liberals, therefore I should probably equate the nature of our discussion by comparing it to picking up liquid mercury with your bare hands. Needless to say, I decided to forgo both the cats and the mercury and just revert back to my national fencing (épée) days which involved the utilization of special tactics in order to overwhelm my opponent.

“En garde,”the moderator shouted. “Fence!”

“We’re better off now than when President Obama took office,”she proudly thrust.

I parried, “What about the record number of people currently on food stamps, or the decline in real wages — the first time this has happened since the Great Depression?”

She feinted, “We’re not perfect,” all the while moving further and further back on the strip.

I quickly disengaged and advanced more swiftly, “Increased bank leverage, more indebtedness, poverty not seen since the 1960s, the student loan bubble, gunboat diplomacy, and the ever-present high-frequency stock market traders.”

My opponent continued to retreat under my repeated froissement. Realizing that she was quickly running out of strip altogether, my left-wing adversary knew she had to make a frantic final stand. I anticipated that her final frenzied maneuver would not be just a lunge, but a double-lunge (a most difficult maneuver, even for a liberal.) Indeed, desperate times dictate desperate measures and my opponent was definitely despondent as she proclaimed, “We’re not perfect and I don’t care about Cyprus!”

I quickly beat back her blade and finished her off with my famous (at least in my mind) fléche, “Obama wants your tax-deferred savings, he’ll only care when we become Cyprus, and then you’ll wonder how it all happened.”

“Touché!”

Afterward, she did shake my hand — very unexpected for a liberal. And that was perfect.